Islam and the New Political Landscape: Faith Communities, Political

45 Pages·2009·0.2 MB·English

Islam and the New Political Landscape: Faith
Communities, Political Participation and Social Change
Les Back, Michael Keith, Azra Khan, Kalbir Shukra and John
Solomos
Abstract
In this paper we consider the forms of democratic participation that
revolve around issues of religious faith and Islam. The context of such
work is one in which a concern with the levels of participation in the
political institutions of Western Europe and North America feature
prominently in both journalistic and academic debate. The paper
speaks to debates that are concerned with the efficacy of specific
forms of participation. In doing so we argue that we need to think
carefully about the forms of social action that constitute participation
in the democratic process. We also need to think precisely about
definitions of the political with which people engage. If we take the
political as a domain in which the ethical settlement of society is
contestable the sorts of mobilisation around faith communities that
this paper describes are clearly a form of political participation. Yet
the paper argues that the reasons many become involved in these
forms of social organisation in contemporary East London is precisely
because they are seen as less complicit with mainstream political
institutions of the British state.
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Keywords: Political participation; Islam; faith communities; religion;
the political; community
Introduction
In the wake of the attack on the World Trade Centre on 11th
September, 2001 and the Madrid and London bombing of 2004 and
2005 a literature that addresses the forms and modalities of religious
expression – particularly Islamic religious expression – has flourished
in the penumbral regions that link mainstream social science to social
policy design, think tanks and journalism. Much of the work has
attempted to define attitudes or predispositions of a Muslim
population in a particular site of tension such as London or the UK
(Barnes, 2006; GFK, 2006; GLA, 2006; Ethnos, 2005; Populus, 2006)
or critiqued particular forms of social policy intervention (Bright,
2006; Mirza et al, 2007)
Studies of Islamism and Jihadism have created a particular focus on
the syncretic and complex links between Islamic religious faith and
forms of social movement and political mobilisation (Husain, 2007;
Kepel, 2004; Kepel, 2006; McRoy, A. 2006; Neville-Jones, P. et al
2006, 2007; Phillips, 2006; Roy, O., 2004, 2006). Conventionally, the
analytical focus has spotlighted the culture of Islam, the belief systems
of the faithful and the historical and geographical trajectories of
Muslim populations across the world in general and in ‘the west’ in
particular (Abbas, 2005; Ansari, 2002; Eade and Garbin, 2002;
Hussein, 2006; Modood, 2005; Ramadan, 1999, 2005).
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In this article the emphasis is different. We argue that studies of
Islamic political participation need to be contextualised carefully
without recourse grand generalities about culture and faith. They are
both structured by and structuring the cultural, institutional and
deliberative landscapes through which they are articulated. In the
case of the British experience, the hidden traces of Christianity in the
formation of the welfare state in the last century, the rapidly changing
cartography of spaces of the political and the role of ‘faith
organisations’ in the restructuring of welfare provision generate the
material social context determining the opportunities and the outlines
of new forms of political participation.
Instead the paper argues that we need to synthesise a sophisticated
understanding of political power in conventional democratic
institutions with a more generational understanding of ethnic
mobilisation than the literatures on the local state or ethnic minority
political participation normally imply (Adamson, 2006; Garbaye, 2005;
Phillips, 2003; Rogers and Tillie, 2001; Verba, 1978). The
reconfiguration of central state / local state relations in the UK since
2000 and the reframing of the balance between participatory and
representative democracy has pluralized the institutions and sites
where political power is contested. A more complex cartography of
political power has invoked consumer ‘choice’ and cultivated more
participatory engagement in deliberative sites such as school
governing bodies, health trusts and partnership structures of
governance in regeneration programmes, welfare reforms and
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neighbourhood renewal. As with all such emergent institutional forms
of deliberation these may be subject to influence or ‘capture’ by
interest groups that can map the new landscape of political power
better than competing interests.
Alongside the conventional arena of city hall representative local
government, the permeable boundary between state and civil society
describes a territory characterised by relations between community
interests, the voluntary sector and regimes of funding, service
provision and lobbying. It is this complex and mutating cartography
of local power that defines the opportunity structures for new
associations to organise and influence everyday lives.
Here we attempt to examine some of the tensions in such situations;
where political subjects emerge through the collective actions of faith
communities. We do this in Part 1 of the paper by outlining the
construction processes of political subjectivity that we believe are
particularly germane and by considering parallel influences in today’s
East London and the ways in which these forms of mobilisation need
to be contextualised in both local and global terms. We consider the
hidden narratives of religious influence in past processes of political
participation that help to contextualise the present configuration of
racialised democratic participation. In Part 2 we focus on
characterising contemporary forms of Islamic mobilisation in east
London and attempt to provide a framework for understanding them.
In the conclusion we suggest that both the notion of an alternative
public sphere and also a reconsideration of the nature of bureaucratic
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rationality might be helpful in understanding the interplay between
networks of faith communities and more liberally conceptualised
understanding of processes of democratic participation.
The article is based on a sustained ethnographic engagement in
community activism and local politics in East London, focusing in
particular on a set of ethnographic interviews that took place in the
summer immediately before events in New York on 9/11 and the
subsequent armed conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Other work on
related faith based participation in democratic politics continued in
the period from 9/11 through until the spring of 2003. Whilst the
interviews took place over one summer, ethnographic engagement
with the same set of individuals continued over several years before
and since the material quoted here. The comments in this article
attempt to reflect on conversations held over almost eight years, as
well as on one specific set of depth interviews. Over the duration of the
work east London itself was bombed by both a right wing nail bomber
on Brick Lane in 2002 and was the site of both the Aldgate bomb on
7th July 2005 and the attempted bus bombing on Hackney Road two
weeks later.
Having started with an investigation which was about the
participation of minority groups in mainstream British politics the
ethnography demonstrated rapidly that both the actions that qualified
as participation and the arenas that qualified as the political were over
time being rapidly changed. Simultaneously, the formations of
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institutions, local government and organisations that controlled power
and resources in the city were being restructured by new models of
governance. They were being reshaped over the last ten years through
modernisation of both central and local state. Consequently, the
cartographies of power were being changed by this modernisation at
the same time as groups were organising themselves through
networks that mapped themselves asymmetrically onto governance
institutions and the sites of political deliberation.
This article draws on ethnography to locate the techniques through
which new spaces of the political are both created and navigated
through groups of young people whose main organising principle is
determined by Islamic perspectives that are in part about the
emergence of forms of consciously political Islam but are equally
about what it means to act as a good citizen within contemporary
society. Both reflect the traces of migrant history, diasporic sensibility
and transnational Islam. This becomes important because of the ways
in which we reflect on the forms of identification appropriate in a 21st
century multicultural society. In the wake of Britain’s 7/7, then chair
of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, suggested that
British society is sleepwalking into segregation, Gordon Brown has
emphasised the importance of generating new senses of Britishness
and the Department of Communities and Local Government
conducted a national commission considering the potential to create
new forms of community cohesion and integration (2007).
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In part responding to the tenor of these debates, this article argues
that the ethnographic worlds described do not square easily with
appeals to participate in the unitary world of the nation state. A world
regulated by a singular sense of national belonging, framed by sets of
rights and responsibilities that calculate citizenship on a purely
national basis will not necessarily be adequate either to describe the
plural political imaginaries that structure forms of contemporary
political participation based on religious faith or understand the forms
of political mobilisation that are evolving at the boundaries of state
and civil society in contemporary Britain.
In the context of this paper we argue that spaces of these forms of
participation appeals at geographical scales both above and below
those of the nation state. Transnationally, the geopolitics of Islamic
networks link the work of Saudi influenced Wahaabi Islam and the
Gulf rooted networks of the Muslim Brotherhood link through
London’s mediation to the South Asian Islamism of Jamaat i Islam.
Subnationally, civic participation in known neighbourhoods at a local
level appeal to a strong sense of communitarian engagement at
smaller geographical scales, frequently on an interfaith basis that
either is openly opposed to conventional party politics or else
confounds it through new forms of collective action in governing
bodies, voluntary organisations and third sector agencies that focus
on welfare provision of youth services, substance abuse work and
extra curricular education.
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The new political landscape and faith based mobilisations
Two assertions lie at the heart of the argument developed here. The
first of these is that we need to think carefully about the frames that
elide ethnic difference or religious faith through languages of social
mobilisation structured and the second is that we need to understand
the recursive relationship between governmentality and cultural
formation. Over the duration of our work the dynamics of
participation of Bangladeshi individuals and organisations in local
politics was inflected by the growing significance of individual actors
and groups who stressed more their religious affiliation to Islam than
their ethnic identification. Groups of people that share a migrant
history or a geographical commonality may be regarded as collective
entities but not in ways that should be taken for granted or
considered as natural. Communities are invariably imagined,
invented, remembered, performed and invoked. They are subject to
struggles and processes of making alongside forces of tension,
fragmentation and forgetting.
In this sense analyses of ethnicity and its descriptive use in tandem
with the notion of community need to be qualified by a consideration
of the fragility of the processes of construction of collective identity.
Ethnicity in the metropolises of the contemporary west is neither a
reactionary localising negation of the global – as it at times appears in
the prose of Wieviorka (2000), Touraine (2000) and Castells (1997) -
nor a primordial form of community differentiation. Instead, as other
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scholars have suggested, ethnoscapes of the city may be characterised
by particularly globalised networks of kinship and diaspora that
demonstrate the glocalisation of collective and religious identities
(Appadurai, 1996; Bhatt, 1997). Analytically a focus on the processes
of community making and remaking and the boundary creation and
dissolution of markers of ethnic difference must take equal precedence
alongside the study of objects that are communities or subjects that
are ethnicities.
In the context of contemporary debates around emerging Islamic
identities and forms of political Islam in today’s Europe it is always
necessary to consider the dynamics and (diachronic) processes of
becoming and the performance of particular forms of politics alongside
any (synchronic) notion of identity and being. This means thinking
about the ways and moments through which specific forms of
participation are thought of as Islamic rather than (or as well as)
being Bangladeshi, Mirpuri, Somali or Gujerati. In the east end of
London in the early 21st century, Islamic politics is dominated by the
juxtaposition of diasporic Bangladeshi identity, and the transnational
cultural traffic between the Gulf and the Indian subcontinent
mediated by the European metropolis. But the interface of ethnic and
religious identity is also complicated further by the growing presence
of Somali and refugee communities of Islamic faith in overlapping
social and political spaces of the city whose diasporic co-ordinates are
different again.
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The range of behaviours that might be catalogued as political
participation based on religious faith describes a spectrum rather
than a typology of characters, separated by degree and biography.
The separation of religious observation through what Roy (2004) has
described as degrees of religiosity to forms of faith based politics more
and on to extreme moments of action is marked by biography and
varying degrees of affinity more than by categoric boundaries (see also
Husain, 2006). But such shades, degrees and contradictions of
sentimental affiliation sit uneasily with more Manichean
characterisations of the faithful that come from an Islamophobic
cadre, a hostile media and even more sympathetic liberal voices and
the mosques themselves
Several of the informants that were interviewed in the work for this
paper have also subsequently suggested knowledge of individuals that
had left the country to fight against American and British troops.
Contemporary British media representations of Islamic terror are
starkly domesticated through the multinational nature of the
population at American prison Camp x-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, the
appearance of the first British suicide bombers1 and the first domestic
outrages in the bombing of London in July 2005. Part urban myth,
part grim reality the Islamic terrorist reconfigures the frame through
which politicised Islam is seen in the United Kingdom. Yet if the boys

1 On April 30th 2003 Asif Muhammad Hanif (aged 21) and Omar Khan Sharif (aged 27), two young men
and British from relatively privileged backgrounds were involved in the suicide bombing and deaths of
three people at Mike’s Place, a bar in Tel Aviv. Hanif died but Sharif remains on the run from police in
Israel and the United Kingdom
(http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,11026,949728,00.html).
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